FromChapter 1: What Is Kendo?

Kendo and Sport

Modern Kendo equipment includes the shinai, a split bamboo stick just under four feet long (fig. 1), and the bogu, a set of light armor (fig. 2). The object in kendo combat is to deliver a strike or thrust with the shinai to prescribed targets on the bogu: the men (head), including the forehead and the right and left sides; the right and left sides of the kote (forearm); the right and left sides of the do (torso); and the tsuki (throat). Sometimes a thrust to the chest is also permitted. A strike or thrust is counted only when accompanied by speed, force, accuracy, physical coordination, and concentration.

With its special equipment and precisely defined rules, kendo fits the modern definition of a sport—a structured human activity carried out in leisure time for the purpose of recreating the human personality. Leisure-time activities are those in which coercion is absent and that bring about a change of attitude in minds ordinarily focused on making a living. The purpose of kendo is to enhance physical and mental growth. But kendo is different from other martial arts. For example, judo, karate, and aikido may have a certain value as weaponless forms of self-defense, but kendo requires a shinai, or for that matter a sword, something not normally carried on city streets. Kendo is basically designed to perfect the kind of discipline necessary to cultivate alertness, speed of action, and, most important of all, direct cognition. All these qualities are required to cope with the flashing attacks of an opponent's shinai in the course of intense combat practice. These qualities require concentration rather than physical strength. Thus, kendo can be practiced by the young and old, male and female.

Although kendo is a sport, it does have one major aspect that differentiates it from Western sports: classical kendo developed under actual battlefield conditions where life and death were at stake, and under the influence of Buddhism.

When a samurai faced his opponent, sword drawn, fear was inevitably aroused. What was the source of this fear? The opponent? The sword that was thrust toward him? No. Fear is created by one's own mind. One must conquer the fear within oneself before one can conquer the opponent. How does the kendo practitioner do that?

The conscious mind gives rise to the ego. The ego is that aspect of the mind that takes the self as the measuring stick of the world and ultimately seeks self-preservation. It is the ego that breeds fear. Under this circumstance, the most effective move to make is an all-out "go-for-broke" attack, which is referred to as a sutemi (literally "body-abandoning") attack. It is in this kind of an attack—an attack in which there is no intrusion of the ego-based intellect—that a kendo practitioner is apt to discover mushin.

Mushin is a term that D. T. Suzuki, the Zen master who made the term Zen a part of the Western vocabulary, translated as the "mind of no-mind." Simply put, it refers to an altered state of consciousness, a state of mind freed from an ego-clouded vision that cannot be swayed by external distractions. This state of mind is called the true self. Of course, mushin is realized in many Western sports as well, for example, baseball, basketball, and swimming. But kendo is unique because it requires meditation (see fig. 3) to realize it. Why?

Whereas the foremost concern in Western sports is to respond to an external challenge and to defeat the opponent (or to break an existing record), the foremost concern in kendo is to tame the ego by internalizing challenge. Taming the ego prevents the mind from being swayed by external distractions, enables the practitioner to develop concentration and alertness, and provides the reflexive mechanism necessary to develop kendo skills. But more important than that is to enable its practitioners to channel that discipline to realize personal growth, an issue that will be discussed in further detail in chapter 5. Thus whereas Western sports emphasize relaxation—the absence of attention and effort—to control anxiety, kendo emphasizes meditation to tame the ego. Although both are designed to bring about a new mental state, the difference in approach stems from a different cultural orientation. Kendo attempts not only to develop a new mental state, but also to cultivate its norm of ethical behavior in the practice of the art itself; it claims that practice and ethical behavior are inseparable because both stem from taming the ego.